Immigration reform: Boehner said it’s now down to a matter of ‘trust

House Speaker Boehner said that what’s holding up immigration reform
is a ‘trust gap’ with President Obama. But that doesn’t mean the door
is shut on action in the House, even in an election year.

By Francine Kiefer

WASHINGTON — Immigration reform, long stalled in the U.S. House, is coming down to this: Republicans don’t trust President Obama to enforce immigration laws and won’t act on new legislation until that trust gap narrows.
House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio said that distrust is “one of the biggest obstacles” to getting reform done.”There’s widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws,” he said. “And it’s going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes.”
Democrats dubbed this new focus on “trust” a dodge to get around the fact that Boehner can’t control his fractious caucus. But some close
observers of Congress’s difficult and protracted struggle over
immigration debate see some promise in this turn in the debate.
For the first time in a very long time, policy differences are not at
the heart of the immigration dispute — at least among many Republicans
in the House, where immigration reform hit a wall after the Senate
passed a bipartisan bill last year.
In an aside, Mr. Boehner commented that Republicans “by and large”
support principles that he released at a private GOP retreat for House
members a week ago. Both the president and key Democrats in the House
have expressed openness to the principles, which allow for a path to
legal status for some 11 million undocumented immigrants in America,
but no “special” path to citizenship.
That said, the trust issue is a mountainous obstacle, depending on
whose trust the president needs to win. If “trustees” include the
faction of Republicans who will never agree to immigration reform, who
dislike Mr. Obama so intensely that they can’t bring themselves to
support anything he supports, then, no, he is unlikely to ever win
their trust. But if it refers to the Republican leadership — and if it
is the leadership that is driving reform in the House — it is not
mission impossible, according to some observers.
“Certainly, some Republicans, no matter what, say ‘We can’t trust this
guy and we can’t negotiate with him.’ But they’re not the head of the
party and they’re not the kingmaker,” said Lanae Erickson Hatalsky,
director of social policy and politics at Third Way, a moderate
Democrat think tank. She, and others, can think of several ways that
Mr. Obama can respond on the trust front.
Hold the line on deportations
The president is under tremendous pressure to ease up on deportations,
even stop them altogether, especially given his State of the Union
emphasis on using executive orders, when necessary, when Congress
fails to act. But the president has so far held the line on these
anti-deportation demands. There may be no better way to show that he’s
enforcing the law than by reminding Congress that he’s doing that now
in the face of huge pressure.
Keep working on the personal
Trust gets built through personal relationships — and as America has
learned by now, schmoozing is not this professor-in-chief’s strong
point. As Ms. Erickson Hatalsky points out, he may not be able to
build relationships with the “backbenchers” but he can at least
improve them with Republican leaders in the House. “He’s begun to do
that,” she said, and if there is continued progress on issues such as
a noneventful raising of the debt ceiling, that could continue.
Get others to reinforce the enforcement message
Republicans complain that Obama has ignored the law by blocking
deportation action for children of illegal immigrants who meet certain
criteria and by prioritizing enforcement for those who are considered
of highest risk to America. But this is well within the president’s
authority, said Doris Meissner, director of the Migration Policy
Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that studies global migration. Not
only that, she said, the Obama administration has continued a 20-year
trend of increasing spending and action on enforcement of US
immigration laws. In fact, spending on immigration outpaces all other
federal criminal law enforcement combined, she said.
This positive record of enforcement and its benefits should be voiced
by police chiefs and mayors around the country, as well as leaders of
other countries who are receiving record numbers of deportees, not by
a toxic president who’s made the case before, said Ms. Meissner. Many
in Congress weren’t around for the last big immigration push and
aren’t aware of the two-decade upward trend in enforcement, she adds.
These, however, are the views of outsiders. Democrats on the Hill and
the White House don’t see the president as having to respond — the
ball is in Boehner’s court, they say. He needs to follow through on
his repeated line that he wants to get immigration reform done.
White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed the trust issue as
irrelevant. “The challenges within the Republican Party on this issue
are well-known, and they certainly don’t have anything to do with the
president,” Mr. Carney said.
A key House Democrat, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) of Maryland, echoed
that sentiment: “I see this as a sad and desperate attempt by the
speaker to blame the president for the speaker’s own inability to
persuade his caucus of the importance of taking action on immigration
reform,” he said, in an interview.
“I interpret this as the speaker throwing in the towel with his own
caucus,” he added. Democrats had hoped — and “still hold out hope” —
that House Republicans will move forward on immigration reform. “But
these kinds of comments just poison the well” with Democrats.
In fact, many Republicans oppose taking up immigration in an election
year, period. At his press conference Thursday, Boehner acknowledged
the “difficulty” of getting immigration reform done in the House this
year.
But Third Way’s Erickson Hatalsky suggests that if Boehner is sincere
in wanting immigration reform — and many Democrats, even minority
leader Nancy Pelosi, believe he is — he has plenty of cover to push an
unpopular position, including from the business community and
Evangelicals.
It’s possible, she adds, that Boehner could get started this year and
finish next year. Republicans and Democrats are now “very close
together” on the “big issues,” she said. “I’m feeling pretty
optimistic that at least some progress will happen in this Congress.”

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